Good news and bad news regarding the new MacBook Pro

The good news: the new MacBook Pro's battery life is amazing. The bad news: …

The new MacBook Pro models introduced at last week's WWDC, particularly the 13" and 15" models, have a number of hardware changes. FireWire coming back to the 13" model? Good. SD card slot? Mixed. The non-changeable battery? Though some are up in arms about the change, a battery that can last as long just over eight hours might bring them around. Oddly, though, some users are reporting that SATA performance for the new systems may have somewhat of a downgrade.

Over at AnandTech, the new 15" MacBook Pro was pitted head-to-head against a recent vintage of the previous model. Anand Lal Shimpi says the fixed, flat-pack battery gives the new MacBook Pros "the best battery life I've ever seen." When running on the integrated GPU in the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, playing iTunes steadily in the background, and loading a series of 20 webpages every 20 seconds, the MacBook Pro ran for a few minutes over eight hours. That bests the previous unibody MacBook Pro by three hours.

Several different tests gave battery life results anywhere from a 50 to 100 percent improvement over the "old and busted" previous gen. Since the new non-swappable battery only has 46 percent more capacity, Shimpi believes Apple has done a lot of optimizations across all the hardware to eke out every last bit of power savings.

"There’s no other way to say this," wrote Shimpi. "If you care about battery life and portability at all, buy the new MacBook Pro. Go to the Apple store and buy one."

One curious bit of news, though, comes from several readers over at MacRumors. It seems that the SATA controller in the new 13" and 15" MacBook Pro models reports as being capable of 1.5Gbps, while previous models and even the lowly white plastic MacBook are capable of the currently-standard 3.0Gbps. Though most mechanical drives can't really saturate a 1.5Gbps connection, some of the newer SSD drives can. Early benchmarks with faster SSDs reveal that the 1.5Gbps limit can in some cases become a bottleneck in raw data transfer speed.

In real-world use, even those with SSD drives aren't likely to notice any performance issues. The NVIDIA 9400M is capable of the full 3.0Gbps speed, so it's possible that it can be enabled with a firmware update. The limit is strange nonetheless, though. (We have sent a request to Apple for comment and will update this post if we hear back.)

All told, the killer battery life seems to override the potential downsides of a slower SATA connection. The thought of getting a full day's worth of work out of a single charge seems just this side of magical.